The commotion wrought in Julian's mind by the abrupt incursion of
Ethelberta into his quiet sphere was thorough and protracted. The
witchery of her presence he had grown strong enough to withstand in part;
but her composed announcement that she had intended to marry another,
and, as far as he could understand, was intending it still, added a new
chill to the old shade of disappointment which custom was day by day
enabling him to endure. During the whole interval in which he had
produced those diapason blasts, heard with such inharmonious feelings by
the three auditors outside the screen, his thoughts had wandered wider
than his notes in conjectures on the character and position of the
gentleman seen in Ethelberta's company. Owing to his assumption that
Lord Mountclere was but a stranger who had accidentally come in at the
side door, Christopher had barely cast a glance upon him, and the wide
difference between the years of the viscount and those of his betrothed
was not so particularly observed as to raise that point to an item in his
objections now. Lord Mountclere was dressed with all the cunning that
could be drawn from the metropolis by money and reiterated
dissatisfaction; he prided himself on his upright carriage; his stick was
so thin that the most malevolent could not insinuate that it was of any
possible use in walking; his teeth had put on all the vigour and
freshness of a second spring. Hence his look was the slowest of possible
clocks in respect of his age, and his manner was equally as much in the
rear of his appearance.
Christopher was now over five-and-twenty. He was getting so well
accustomed to the spectacle of a world passing him by and splashing him
with its wheels that he wondered why he had ever minded it. His habit of
dreaming instead of doing had led him up to a curious discovery. It is
no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the
active, the rapid, the people of splendid momentum, have been surprised
to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for
discharging their active labours has been to postpone them indefinitely.
Certainly, the immediate result in the present case was, to all but
himself, small and invisible; but it was of the nature of highest things.
What he had learnt was that a woman who has once made a permanent
impression upon a man cannot altogether deny him her image by denying him
her company, and that by sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of this
Creature of Contemplation she becomes to him almost a living soul. Hence
a sublimated Ethelberta accompanied him everywhere--one who never teased
him, eluded him, or disappointed him: when he smiled she smiled, when he
was sad she sorrowed. He may be said to have become the literal
duplicate of that whimsical unknown rhapsodist who wrote of his own
similar situation--
'By absence this good means I gain,
That I can catch her,
Where none can watch her,
In some close corner of my brain:
There I embrace and kiss her;
And so I both enjoy and miss her.'
This frame of mind naturally induced an amazing abstraction in the
organist, never very vigilant at the best of times. He would stand and
look fixedly at a frog in a shady pool, and never once think of
batrachians, or pause by a green bank to split some tall blade of grass
into filaments without removing it from its stalk, passing on ignorant
that he had made a cat-o'-nine-tails of a graceful slip of vegetation. He
would hear the cathedral clock strike one, and go the next minute to see
what time it was. 'I never seed such a man as Mr. Julian is,' said the
head blower. 'He'll meet me anywhere out-of-doors, and never wink or
nod. You'd hardly expect it. I don't find fault, but you'd hardly
expect it, seeing how I play the same instrument as he do himself, and
have done it for so many years longer than he. How I have indulged that
man, too! If 'tis Pedals for two martel hours of practice I never
complain; and he has plenty of vagaries. When 'tis hot summer weather
there's nothing will do for him but Choir, Great, and Swell altogether,
till yer face is in a vapour; and on a frosty winter night he'll keep me
there while he tweedles upon the Twelfth and Sixteenth till my arms be
scrammed for want of motion. And never speak a word out-of-doors.'
Somebody suggested that perhaps Christopher did not notice his
coadjutor's presence in the street; and time proved to the organ-blower
that the remark was just.
Whenever Christopher caught himself at these vacuous tricks he would be
struck with admiration of Ethelberta's wisdom, foresight, and
self-command in refusing to wed such an incapable man: he felt that he
ought to be thankful that a bright memory of her was not also denied to
him, and resolved to be content with it as a possession, since it was as
much of her as he could decently maintain.
Wrapped thus in a humorous sadness he passed the afternoon under notice,
and in the evening went home to Faith, who still lived with him, and
showed no sign of ever being likely to do otherwise. Their present place
and mode of life suited her well. She revived at Melchester like an
exotic sent home again. The leafy Close, the climbing buttresses, the
pondering ecclesiastics, the great doors, the singular keys, the
whispered talk, echoes of lonely footsteps, the sunset shadow of the tall
steeple, reaching further into the town than the good bishop's teaching,
and the general complexion of a spot where morning had the stillness of
evening and spring some of the tones of autumn, formed a proper
background to a person constituted as Faith, who, like Miss Hepzibah
Pyncheon's chicken, possessed in miniature all the antiquity of her
progenitors.
After tea Christopher went into the streets, as was frequently his
custom, less to see how the world crept on there than to walk up and down
for nothing at all. It had been market-day, and remnants of the rural
population that had visited the town still lingered at corners, their
toes hanging over the edge of the pavement, and their eyes wandering
about the street.
The angle which formed the turning-point of Christopher's promenade was
occupied by a jeweller's shop, of a standing which completely outshone
every other shop in that or any trade throughout the town. Indeed, it
was a staple subject of discussion in Melchester how a shop of such
pretensions could find patronage sufficient to support its existence in a
place which, though well populated, was not fashionable. It had not long
been established there, and was the enterprise of an incoming man whose
whole course of procedure seemed to be dictated by an intention to
astonish the native citizens very considerably before he had done. Nearly
everything was glass in the frontage of this fairy mart, and its contents
glittered like the hammochrysos stone. The panes being of plate-glass,
and the shop having two fronts, a diagonal view could be had through it
from one to the other of the streets to which it formed a corner.
This evening, as on all evenings, a flood of radiance spread from the
window-lamps into the thick autumn air, so that from a distance that
corner appeared as the glistening nucleus of all the light in the town.
Towards it idle men and women unconsciously bent their steps, and closed
in upon the panes like night-birds upon the lantern of a lighthouse.
When Christopher reached the spot there stood close to the pavement a
plain close carriage, apparently waiting for some person who was
purchasing inside. Christopher would hardly have noticed this had he not
also perceived, pressed against the glass of the shop window, an unusual
number of local noses belonging to overgrown working lads, tosspots, an
idiot, the ham-smoker's assistant with his sleeves rolled up, a scot-and-
lot freeholder, three or four seamstresses, the young woman who brought
home the washing, and so on. The interest of these gazers in some
proceedings within, which by reason of the gaslight were as public as if
carried on in the open air, was very great.
'Yes, that's what he's a buying o'--haw, haw!' said one of the young men,
as the shopman removed from the window a gorgeous blue velvet tray of
wedding-rings, and laid it on the counter.
''Tis what you may come to yerself, sooner or later, God have mercy upon
ye; and as such no scoffing matter,' said an older man. 'Faith, I'd as
lief cry as laugh to see a man in that corner.'
'He's a gent getting up in years too. He must hev been through it a few
times afore, seemingly, to sit down and buy the tools so cool as that.'
'Well, no. See what the shyest will do at such times. You bain't
yerself then; no man living is hisself then.'
'True,' said the ham-smoker's man. ''Tis a thought to look at that a
chap will take all this trouble to get a woman into his house, and a
twelvemonth after would as soon hear it thunder as hear her sing!'
The policeman standing near was a humane man, through having a young
family he could hardly keep, and he hesitated about telling them to move
on. Christopher had before this time perceived that the articles were
laid down before an old gentleman who was seated in the shop, and that
the gentleman was none other than he who had been with Ethelberta in the
concert-room. The discovery was so startling that, constitutionally
indisposed as he was to stand and watch, he became as glued to the spot
as the other idlers. Finding himself now for the first time directly
confronting the preliminaries of Ethelberta's marriage to a stranger, he
was left with far less equanimity than he could have supposed possible to
the situation.
'So near the time!' he said, and looked hard at Lord Mountclere.
Christopher had now a far better opportunity than before for observing
Ethelberta's betrothed. Apart from any bias of jealousy, disappointment,
or mortification, he was led to judge that this was not quite the man to
make Ethelberta happy. He had fancied her companion to be a man under
fifty; he was now visibly sixty or more. And it was not the sort of
sexagenarianism beside which a young woman's happiness can sometimes
contrive to keep itself alive in a quiet sleepy way. Suddenly it
occurred to him that this was the man whom he had helped in the carriage
accident on the way to Knollsea. He looked again.
By no means undignified, the face presented that combination of slyness
and jocundity which we are accustomed to imagine of the canonical jolly-
dogs in mediaeval tales. The gamesome Curate of Meudon might have
supplied some parts of the countenance; cunning Friar Tuck the remainder.
Nothing but the viscount's constant habit of going to church every Sunday
morning when at his country residence kept unholiness out of his
features, for though he lived theologically enough on the Sabbath, as it
became a man in his position to do, he was strikingly mundane all the
rest of the week, always preferring the devil to God in his oaths. And
nothing but antecedent good-humour prevented the short fits of crossness
incident to his passing infirmities from becoming established. His look
was exceptionally jovial now, and the corners of his mouth twitched as
the telegraph-needles of a hundred little erotic messages from his heart
to his brain. Anybody could see that he was a merry man still, who loved
good company, warming drinks, nymph-like shapes, and pretty words, in
spite of the disagreeable suggestions he received from the pupils of his
eyes, and the joints of his lively limbs, that imps of mischief were busy
sapping and mining in those regions, with the view of tumbling him into a
certain cool cellar under the church aisle.
In general, if a lover can find any ground at all for serenity in the
tide of an elderly rival's success, he finds it in the fact itself of
that ancientness. The other side seems less a rival than a makeshift.
But Christopher no longer felt this, and the significant signs before his
eyes of the imminence of Ethelberta's union with this old hero filled him
with restless dread. True, the gentleman, as he appeared illuminated by
the jeweller's gas-jets, seemed more likely to injure Ethelberta by
indulgence than by severity, while her beauty lasted; but there was a
nameless something in him less tolerable than this.
The purchaser having completed his dealings with the goldsmith, was
conducted to the door by the master of the shop, and into the carriage,
which was at once driven off up the street.
Christopher now much desired to know the name of the man whom a nice
chain of circumstantial evidence taught him to regard as the happy winner
where scores had lost. He was grieved that Ethelberta's confessed
reserve should have extended so far as to limit her to mere indefinite
hints of marriage when they were talking almost on the brink of the
wedding-day. That the ceremony was to be a private one--which it
probably would be because of the disparity of ages--did not in his
opinion justify her secrecy. He had shown himself capable of a
transmutation as valuable as it is rare in men, the change from pestering
lover to staunch friend, and this was all he had got for it. But even an
old lover sunk to an indifferentist might have been tempted to spend an
unoccupied half-hour in discovering particulars now, and Christopher had
not lapsed nearly so far as to absolute unconcern.
That evening, however, nothing came in his way to enlighten him. But the
next day, when skirting the Close on his ordinary duties, he saw the same
carriage standing at a distance, and paused to behold the same old
gentleman come from a well-known office and re-enter the vehicle--Lord
Mountclere, in fact, in earnest pursuit of the business of yesternight,
having just pocketed a document in which romance, rashness, law, and
gospel are so happily made to work together that it may safely be
regarded as the neatest compromise which has ever been invented since
Adam sinned.
This time Julian perceived that the brougham was one belonging to the
White Hart Hotel, which Lord Mountclere was using partly from the
necessities of these hasty proceedings, and also because, by so doing, he
escaped the notice that might have been bestowed upon his own equipage,
or men-servants, the Mountclere hammer-cloths being known in Melchester.
Christopher now walked towards the hotel, leisurely, yet with anxiety. He
inquired of a porter what people were staying there that day, and was
informed that they had only one person in the house, Lord Mountclere,
whom sudden and unexpected business had detained in Melchester since the
previous day.
Christopher lingered to hear no more. He retraced the street much more
quickly than he had come; and he only said, 'Lord Mountclere--it must
never be!'
As soon as he entered the house, Faith perceived that he was greatly
agitated. He at once told her of his discovery, and she exclaimed, 'What
a brilliant match!'
'O Faith,' said Christopher, 'you don't know! You are far from knowing.
It is as gloomy as midnight. Good God, can it be possible?'
Faith blinked in alarm, without speaking.
'Did you never hear anything of Lord Mountclere when we lived at
Sandbourne?'
'I knew the name--no more.'
'No, no--of course you did not. Well, though I never saw his face, to my
knowledge, till a short time ago, I know enough to say that, if earnest
representations can prevent it, this marriage shall not be. Father knew
him, or about him, very well; and he once told me--what I cannot tell
you. Fancy, I have seen him three times--yesterday, last night, and this
morning--besides helping him on the road some weeks ago, and never once
considered that he might be Lord Mountclere. He is here almost in
disguise, one may say; neither man nor horse is with him; and his object
accounts for his privacy. I see how it is--she is doing this to benefit
her brothers and sisters, if possible; but she ought to know that if she
is miserable they will never be happy. That's the nature of women--they
take the form for the essence, and that's what she is doing now. I
should think her guardian angel must have quitted her when she agreed to
a marriage which may tear her heart out like a claw.'
'You are too warm about it, Kit--it cannot be so bad as that. It is not
the thing, but the sensitiveness to the thing, which is the true measure
of its pain. Perhaps what seems so bad to you falls lightly on her mind.
A campaigner in a heavy rain is not more uncomfortable than we are in a
slight draught; and Ethelberta, fortified by her sapphires and gold cups
and wax candles, will not mind facts which look like spectres to us
outside. A title will turn troubles into romances, and she will shine as
an interesting viscountess in spite of them.'
The discussion with Faith was not continued, Christopher stopping the
argument by saying that he had a good mind to go off at once to Knollsea,
and show her her danger. But till the next morning Ethelberta was
certainly safe; no marriage was possible anywhere before then. He passed
the afternoon in a state of great indecision, constantly reiterating, 'I
will go!'